Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Is Early Backer of New Exchange Tagomi

Billionaire investor and PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm is backing a startup that hopes to become the go-to cryptocurreny exchange for wealthy individuals and institutions.

Thiel’s Founder’s Fund is among the backers of Tagomi Systems Inc., whose co-founders include Greg Tusar, the former head of electronic trading at Goldman Sachs GroupInc., according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. Tusar worked at Goldman, then joined high-speed trader KCG Holdings Inc.

The new Tagomi hopes to cut through the fragmented exchange market, which has daily trading limits in many cases and is designed more for smaller investors rather than the fast-moving world of large traders. Tagomi is modeling itself after broker-dealers who use what are termed “smart order routers” that send buy/sell orders to dozens of stock exchanges and can move faster than humans, providing an advantage to large traders.

Tagomi has raised $15.5 million to date, according to the WSJ report.

Thiel has been an early investor in companies like Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX and Lyft. Founders Fund has approximately $3 billion under management.